The typewriter is one of those disruptive innovations that have arrived periodically to shake up written communication: the unified Carolingian alphabet of the middle ages; Gutenberg’s moveable type of the 1450s; the automated typesetting of fin de siècleLinotype and Monotype machines, and of course the modern Internet, have all, like the typewriter, irrevocably changed the way we write. In the typewriter’s case, however, has that change been for better or for worse, however?